In Russian Disinfolklore “Nazis” belong to the Outer Realm. The Russian consumer of Russian Disinfolklore magically accesses the Inner Realm and becomes “Russian” when they rail against “Nazis.” You’re included in the Inner Realm just by virtue of angrily denouncing a category of Ukrainians which exists solely in Russian Disinfolklore. Russian Disinfolklore created the Ukrainian Nazi stock character as a tool. First, the Ukrainian Nazi was a stereotype that existed only in the Russian Disinfolklorist imagination. It became a perennial character in Russian Disinfolklore through means such as this:
The Ukrainian Nazi became an existent in the western mind. It is wholly a product of Russian Disinfolklore. Russian Disinfolklore used this stock character which had no correspondence to reality (the far right vote in Ukraine is less than 1%, while it is far above 20% in Italy and France!) to blunt western support for Ukraine. By promoting the troll that Ukrainians were Nazis (translation: Ukrainians belong to the Outer Realm), they deserved to be genocided, and they are not worthy of support.
The imagery is clumsy and bizarre in these frames from Russian Disinfolklore television - a copy of Mein Kampf is inserted into a “news” item about the capture of a Ukrainian soldier:
As a diplomat in eastern Ukraine, I was once invited to a meeting with a supposed Ukrainian extreme right-wing political party by a Russian diplomat. In the meeting at Svoboda Party in Dnipro, I was directed to a seat beside a bookshelf with Mein Kampf placed on it in a prominent position. I knew immediately I was being trolled by the Russian diplomat, and their Svoboda accomplice - in using Disinfolklore as an analytical technique, as I mention in Lenses of Gender - Disinfolklore (8), intuition matters.
They were trying to provoke me, to troll me, then, as an American diplomat into promoting the idea that an extreme right-wing Ukrainian nationalist political party had a copy of Mein Kampf in its Dnipro office. They expected me to make a Big Thing out of this, which I am doing now, yet in a way that only serves to reveal Russian Disinfolklore. Instead, as an aficionado of Russian Disinfolklore operations (and having been repeatedly targetted by Russian operatives in Ukraine), their botched operation confirmed my prior suspicion that Svoboda was a Russia-funded operation. It was a wolf (a Ukrainian far-right political party) in wolf’s clothing, and funded by a wolf (Russia), as a reservoir for pro-Russia Disinfolklore operations.
As you might also recall, Svoboda was used in pro-Russian president Yanukovich’s plot to to neutralise opposition to his imprisonment of his political rival.
Manafort, Trump’s ex campaign manager who was later himself imprisoned for tax fraud related to his work in Ukraine, was promoting the fact that Yanukovich’s rival had been in coalition with Svoboda when she was Ukraine’s prime minister as evidence that she sympathised with anti-semitism. So, here you have a political party that professes extreme Ukrainian nationalism, is anti-semitic and is funded by Russia.
Then, the Russia-funded ex-president of the United States’s campaign manager uses this Russia-funded anti-semitic party to neutralise opposition to the barbaric imprisonment of the former prime minister of Ukraine. This stuff is devilishly complicated. I acknowledge this. If you are going to counter Russian Disinfolklore, protect democracy, and face down authoritarianism, then, I would suggest it’s worth getting your head around these Russian Disinfolklore operations, no matter how complicated they seem. Disinfolklore is an analytical method to parse Russian disinformation that helps you navigate this Alice Through the Looking-Glass world Russian Disinfolklore creates to exhaust our capacity to fight back. Russian Disinfolklore has identifying markers running through it like the way a fluorescent dye identifies artificial DNA inserts. Disinfolklore teaches you to identify this fluorescence.
Svoboda was a stock character in pro-Russia Disinfolklore operations in Ukraine. Its stock-in-trade anti-semitism had been used by the former US president’s jailed campaign manager Paul Manafort. Manafort had needed a way to annihilate sympathy in the west for the former Ukrainian prime minister Rapunzel Julia Tymoshenko who Manafort’s then boss - the impeached ex-president of Ukraine - had imprisoned in a tower.
So Manafort ran a secret influence campaign that implied Tymoshenko’s unjust imprisonment was deserved because she had headed a coalition with Svoboda.
Russia has a long history of creating, stoking, and manipulating anti-semitism, in order to further Russia’s own aims. Soviet propagandists normalised anti-Semitism around the world by branding it as mere “anti-Zionism.”
Russia is an anti-semitic state. It is led by anti-semitic men, like Putin and Medvedyev. That Russia, a country where Jews are not safe, should messianically take it upon itself to invade Ukraine, where Ukrainian Jew do feel safe, is off the scale chutzpah.
In parsing Russian Disinfolklore and indeed in spotting it, any reference to anti-semitism in Ukraine or Nazis, in any context related to Russia’s genocidal war against Ukrainians, immediately identifies this as Russian Disinfolklore.
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During my seven years in Ukraine, I worked closely with Ukrainian Jewish community members. For example, in 2018 after a pro-Russia politician made anti-semitic comments in the media, I met the leader of the Jewish community in Dnipro.
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Given this experience, it did not surprise me to see appeals like this one from Ukraine’s Jewish community, in which a Ukrainian Jewish community member
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So whenever we hear actual anti-semitic Russian leaders and those who echo their nonsense about Nazis in Ukraine, it’s important to weigh properly the situation. On the one hand you have a Jewish president of Ukraine, Ukrainian Jewish community members and diplomats like me explaining: “This is pure Disinfolklore. It’s nonsense.” Yet, on the other hand, you have Russia and its paid agents promoting anti-semitic political parties in Ukraine, while attacking sacred Jewish sites and communities. It’s like a double annihilation. And it is the epitome of Russia’s shape-shifting Disinfolklore techniques.
There is a touch of magic to Russian Disinfolklore. Let’s take a Russian language speaking Ukrainian from the mainly Russian language speaking Ukrainian city of Mariupol. Russia has killed around one hundred thousand Ukrainians in Mariupol since February 24th 2022. Let’s imagine an archetypal female Ukrainian in Mariupol. In Russian Disinfolklore she and her child were being held captive by Ukrainian Nazis. She was the reason why Russia acted on its messianic impulse to “save” Russian-speaking Ukrainians from the non-existent Nazis.
I lived in eastern Ukraine for seven years. I met thousands of native Russian language speaking Ukrainians. Between 2015 and 2022, as a diplomat, I had detailed conversations with over one thousand elected political leaders, community leaders, Civil Society Organisation activists, teachers, police, military and ordinary people in a variety of contexts, including at the Bridge. I was also living embedded in the very communities in eastern Ukraine which Russian Disinfolklore claimed were being held hostage by Nazis. I repeatedly visited President Zelenskyy’s hometown of Kryvyi Rih where I met with all kinds of community leaders. I frequently visited the flat complex where President Zelenskyy grew up as a native Russian speaking Ukrainian Jewish community member.
I never found any evidence of any discrimination. Nor did I ever find even a scintilla of desire for liberation by Russia. Yet, in Russian Disinfolklore the very people I lived among were represented as wanting and requiring “liberation.”
So we return to this archetype from Mariupol. According to Russian Disinfolklore on the 20th of March 2022 we have an Inner Realm native Russian language speaking Ukrainian in need of liberation by Russia. She is hurrying with her daughter to Drama Theatre in Mariupol to shelter from Russian shelling. Drama Theatre has been a central character in Mariupol’s community life for generations - it is more than a mere theatre. Perhaps our native Russian language speaking Ukrainian had met her partner at Drama?! She will have certainly brought her daughter to performances of Swan Lake and other folklore-themed theatrical performances in the theatre. Generations of Mariupol dwellers met at Drama for tea, dates, just to hang out, and to be entertained.
On the morning of 20th March 2022, as she was sheltering with her small daughter in Drama’s basement, a two hundred pound bomb was dropped from a Russian airforce aeroplane.
This bomb annihilated our Russian language speaking Ukrainian, her daughter and around five-hundred-and-ninety-eight other native Russian language speaking Ukrainians who thought they were safe there. The Russian language word for children was painted in bright letters in front of the shelter:
The moment the bomb dropped, Russian Disinfolklore banished our archetype from the Inner Realm. Suddenly, she was among the Nazis deserving of extermination. Russian Disinfolklore which before the bomb dropped used such people as their casus belli, now having annihilated them physically, expelled them also from the Russian Inner Realm.
Now it is common to read of ordinary Russians under the spell of Russian Disinfolklore speak of how Ukrainians should be killed. Here is an interesting example from an Associated Press analysis of thousands of phone calls from Russian occupiers in Bucha from March 2022. In one of the calls a Russian occupier Ivan is speaking to his mother:
Mother: “Are those bastards getting cleaned up?… F***ing, F***ing, F***ing kill them all. You have my blessing.
Russian Disinfolklore legends legislate by their mere pronouncement who remains in the Inner Realm and who once pronounced upon by story or bomb, belongs rightly, according to Disinfolkloric logic, in the Outer Realm.
By claiming certain Ukrainians are “Nazis” Russian Disinfolklore magically and forcibly transfers the “Nazi” who, like President Zelenskyy, may well be a Jewish native Russian speaking Ukrainian, from the Inner to the Outer Realm. Russian Disinfolklore resolves the apparent contradiction of forcibly transferring the epitome of an anti-Nazi in the historical sense - a Jewish Community member like President Zelenskyy - and the epitome of an anti-Nazi in the Russian contemporary Disinfolklore sense - a native Russian language speaking ethnic Russian Ukrainian - from the Inner native Russian language speaking Realm into the Outer Realm thus:
Note how the Disinfolklorist - here Russia’s former president and its current deputy head of its national security council - Nazifies the double- un-Nazifiable president of Ukraine by comparing him to a Jewish community member forced on pain of death by actual Nazis in a concentration camp to clear up the remains of Jews exterminated in the gas chambers.
This is the evil magic of Russian Disinfolklore. On one level, it is complete nonsense. Yet, on another level, for those afflicted by it, it transforms the identities of its victims - those it says are in the Outer Realm (Nazis, Ukrainians, the native Russian speaking Ukrainians Russia kills, or native Russian language ethnic Russian Ukrainians, like President Zelenskyy, who resist being annihilated by Russian Disinfolklore).
Russian Disinfolklore feeds the psychological neediness of its avid Russian consumers to belong to their own fictional and wholly artificial Inner Realm of Russian language speakers.
Russian Disinfolklore with its Inner (anti-Nazi) Realm / Outer (Nazi) Realm is, like all infectious ideologies, extremely agile, simple and poisonous. Your participation in the Inner Realm (Russian language speaking Ukrainian) can flow you directly into the Outer Realm with the mere explosion of a bomb, or the pronouncement in social media of the ex president of Russia. Those Inner Realm Russians who, at one moment, support your salvation through military occupation, a second later after the bomb or Tweet drops will celebrate your having been “cleaned up” as a “pest.” Or, worse, they will deny they even bombed Drama, Or that no-one but Nazis was sheltering inside. One moment in Russian Disinfolklore, you’re worth saving, at the next they exterminate you (Literally they deMana you. They take out your Mina. Your power.)
You can’t compromise with Ruschian Disinfolklore. You cannot make a deal with it. It’s a shape-shifting beast. A troll. A bogey. A ghost. It’s an agile designation meaning this in Disinfolklore today, but that in Disinfolklore tomorrow. People make the mistake of thinking they’re dealing with something solid. That they can negotiate with an elf. Yet, in Disinfolklore everything that’s apparently made of solid copper, melts into air.
There is one weapon you can use against Russian Disinfolklore: War Magic. President Zelenskyy has mastered the art of enspelling his enemies and the enemy of all Ukrainians. We will refer again and again in future Disinfolklore episodes to President Zelenskyy’s mastery of magic (trolling and emotionally resonant manipulation is a form of magic). But, for now, I shall leave you with this taster. It’s from a video released by President Zelenskyy in May 2022. President is referring to Putin, but he doesn’t use his name:
“The one who is repeating the horrific crimes of Hitler’s regime today following Nazi philosophy, copying everything they did. He is doomed. Because he was cursed by millions of ancestors when he began to imitate their killer. And therefore he will lose everything.”
[Disinfolklore ]
Disinfolklore (11)
Disinfolklore is the name of this manual. Disinfolklore is also the subject of this book…
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embedded-post-meta 3 years ago · DecodingTrolls